


There Is Beauty Here As Well

by suddenlyGoats



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Transcendence (Gravity Falls), Gen, Space Time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:08:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26843404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suddenlyGoats/pseuds/suddenlyGoats
Summary: Alcor finds connection in an unusual place
Comments: 5
Kudos: 30





	There Is Beauty Here As Well

He couldn’t keep doing this.

They were past the point of being able to respond to him. It had been a few million years since they had anything to say, and their core was, all things considered, fairly cool by now. 

Alcor stared at the massive diamond that was all that was left of his… had they been friends? They had certainly talked a lot, for a few billion years. Did that make them friends? They hadn’t been that interesting of conversations. But they had been something, which is what he needed. It was a little hard to get too invested in a conversation knowing that the other person would be little more than a smoldering ball of carbon and oxygen in only tens of billions of years. 

It was getting harder to talk to stars. Trillions of years ago it had seemed like such a great idea. Other mortals had such short lives, but at the time the lives of stars had seemed infinite. And by comparison to other mortals, they may as well had been. In comparison to him, however…

Well. A main sequence star had millions to billions of years. Their remnants lasted longer but not long enough. A red dwarf could actually live a decent chunk of time but they tended to not be as talkative as their more energetic cousins, and as stars weren’t the best conversationalists to start with… There were a few red dwarfs that he made an effort to swing by once in a while, but for the most part he let them be. 

He drifted away from the cooled stellar remnant, from the three long dead planets that circled it still. 

He couldn’t keep doing this.

But what else could he do? He was, at his core, a social being. Most of the flock were sleeping right now. It was cruel to demand that they stay awake to amuse him. If he could sleep things would be a bit easier, but he couldn’t, he could only confine himself to his thoughts and let the loneliness tear at him. 

He flew through space for a while, not towards anything in particular, just away from the reminder of entropy that had been his conversational partner. 

What was there to do?

Maybe he should drop by one of those red dwarfs. They were something. Something was better then nothing. Anything was better then nothing. It had to be. 

He didn’t really feel like saying hi to someone who barely acknowledged him though. He’d come around eventually, he always did, but right now he wasn’t in the mood. 

He stopped and looked around. He was a few light years from anything significant. He relaxed and spent a couple years observing the photons of distant stars that ended their long trips upon his skin. They tingled, ever so slightly, transferring an inconsequential amount of energy from their parent object to him. He missed the days that distant galaxies’ light could reach him, there was something about those ancient radio waves that was comforting, but dark energy had long since whisked them away.

There was still the cosmic background radiation at least. Redshifted into being unrecognizable as it was, it was still there, gently singing the shape of the Universe’s early days to him. 

A photon hit him, and something about it made him do a double take. It wasn’t very energetic, merely a radio wave, a bit more energetic then that of the early universe but still something he wouldn’t have noticed normally. He reversed time just a little to peel it off of him and look at it more closely. 

This photon had been sent with Intention, with a little message subtly tied to it with magic. The message had no words in any language, but was made of pure intent. Its meaning was clear.

“There is beauty here as well. You are loved.”

He traced back the path the photon had taken to reach him through the sky to the center of the galaxy. There were a number of stars that theoretically could have sent it but he knew it didn’t come from any of them. His omnessences helpfully informed him that this photon was a bit of Hawking radiation from the supermassive black hole nested in the galactic heart. 

He paused. He was very powerful, unfathomably so, but primordial black holes were still something he avoided. He had gone into the hearts of stellar black holes before, just to see what it was like but… Billions of stellar masses were just… a lot. It was a lot. He could comprehend it at this point in his life but it wasn’t the sort of thing that he ever poked. 

Maybe it was time for that to change?

Alcor zoomed his awareness in to an impossibly small scale and watched the quantum dance that he so frequently ignored. As a virtual particle and it’s antimatter partner formed he froze them before they could collide and annihilate, and dismissed the antimatter to somewhere else in the universe. He tied a message to the newly formed photon, and sent it back to the black hole. 

“Who are you?” 

And he waited. 

He was ten thousand light years away from the center of the galaxy. 

He could have blipped the message there. 

Or he could have blipped himself. 

But he didn’t.

Why would he?

What would be the point of saving a few thousand years?

The message arrived at its destination.

He waited for a response. 

The universe continued to expand out from itself.

A photon hit him, message attached. He looked it over.

“We are Significant. Who are you?”

He sent his message.

“I am Alcor. Would you mind if we talked a while?”

And waited.

“Of course we can talk, Alcor. We love you.”

He sent his message back almost instantly.

“Why would you love me?”

Ten thousand years after it reached its destination, a response arrived. 

“Why would we not? Why should there ever not be love?”

Alcor spent a couple centuries sensing that message, mulling it over. 

When should there ever not be love?

It had been so long since he had loved anyone other than the flock. It had been so long since he had interacted with anyone he loved.

He didn’t want to explain how much love had hurt. Eventually he sent his response. 

“You don’t know me, we just started talking.”

Twenty thousand years passed in no time at all.

“And isn’t that wonderful? And isn’t that exciting? And isn’t that something to love? It is rare for us to encounter someone new. It is okay that we don’t know you yet. We can learn. All of us can learn about each other.”

He decided to let the love issue drop. He didn’t want to think about it for another ten thousand years. He decided to focus on a different part of the message.

“Are you more than one person?”

He sent the photon off and watched as it’s quanum partner raced off from where he had sent it. 

“We are many. And we are growing, ever growing. Are you only one?”

He thought about the soul that was tied to his core for the first time in a trillion years. 

“I am only myself, yes.”

He rested as best he could while waiting for the response. Letting vast swaths of information pass through him unprocessed. 

“Well you have us now. You may not be part of us, but you needn't be alone. There are others as well, some like yourself are one, and some are more. I can tell you where they are in relation to you if you would like.”

If the others were black holes there were hundreds of millions of them within the galaxy he currently occupied. He wondered how many of them were talking to each other. 

  
“I would like that, yes. I take it that you are more people than any of the others?”

He waited. The message came soon enough.

“Why yes, we are. How did you know such a thing?”

He responded.

“It was a guess. You are the oldest and most massive of your kind that can be detected from here.”

A cosmic blink of an eye later came the black hole’s reply. 

“We are older then any of the others that still sing. We had many siblings our age once, but eventually our messages stopped reaching one another. What is it that you mean by ‘my kind’?”

He thought for a few centuries on how to explain what a black hole was to a black hole.

“I am something very different from you. Younger, but not much younger, and I’m older then many of the others. I’m not sure how to describe what I am in a way you would understand. How would you describe what you are?”

He was a bit excited to see how a black hole would conceptualize themself. It wasn’t something he had ever really pondered before the conversation started a hundred and sixty thousand years ago. He was a little surprised at his own excitement. He hadn’t felt excitement for a very long time.

“We are many, gathered together as one, and gathering more as time progresses, but this was not always the case. Once, we were one, and then we split into ourself and our siblings. We are love. We love ourselves, we love the others, we love that which does not sing in a way we understand. We seek answers about how everything fits together, about why we gather more but the others often don’t, about why our siblings’ messages stopped, about everything we wonder. And we are excited to talk to you, Alcor, as you speak as if you may have answers to some of our wonderings.”

He spent a while just sensing the response. He had never thought too hard about what a black hole would be like before, but he probably would have assumed that they were violent and hungry and more demon-like then any other stellar body. Loving and curious are definitely not adjectives that would have occurred to him.

“That’s wonderful but I meant physically.”

He waited. 

“Physically? We aren’t sure what you mean.”

He read that over in his mind for a while. Why he assumed that something with no physical adjacency would care about their physical existence enough to describe it he wasn’t sure.

“When I look at you I see something that I call a black hole, something with the mass of many stars that collapsed into an infinitely small space. You have a pull so strong that even light cannot escape it. I am assuming the other’s are also black holes, but you are slightly different from them. Whereas they were stars once, you are older than stars. Once the Universe was uniform, I am assuming this is the time when you were one. The Universe was very dense then, everything was very close together, and parts of it started collapsing into black holes such as yourself and what I assume to be your siblings. The universe then expanded, and eventually it started expanding faster than your messages can travel so you lost contact with your siblings.”

He sent his message on it’s long journey and waited to see what questions Significant would have.

“Thank you for sharing your perspective, you have given us much to think over. I do wonder though, if the universes’ expansion has stolen my sibling’s messages away how I can keep talking with the others.”

He found himself smiling as he figured out how to answer the question,

“It is because we are all held together by gravity’s hold. Most things have a property called mass. Mass attracts mass, but it’s attraction grows weaker over distance. This attraction is the force of gravity. You and the others are close enough that gravity is keeping you together. Your siblings were much further from you, so the expansion of the universe overpowered the force of gravity between you. This is why when their messages could still reach you they took so much longer to arrive then those of the others.”

Significant kept asking questions, prodding deeper into his knowledge of the universe. They told him how to contact many other black holes, which, well, he didn’t actually need the help finding them but the gesture was kind and he was not going to turn it away. The network of black holes were a curious lot, fascinated with the idea of a physical universe, and excited to share their own explanations and stories and lives with someone new. 

Before he knew it a generation of stars had been born and gone nova, not that he paid it much attention. He had his friends, and even with the slow evaporation of hawking radiation they weren’t going anywhere any time soon. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to the 18+ discord for the idea of Alcor befriending black holes. Thanks to Toothpastecanyon for betaing.


End file.
